RL always says Soylent is doing very well, but it seems to me that this discussion group is not all that active. Where are all these customers? I am a member of lots of forums, and this seems less active than most of them.

Good question. We don’t know a lot, unfortunately. Here’s a few factoids:

According to A Food Startup Only Silicon Valley Could Create, Rosa Labs had $10 million of full year revenue in 2014 and predicted revenue of $36 million for 2015. I haven’t seen any final figures for 2015 or any predicted figures for 2016 yet. It also says they raised $24.97 million.

I’m not a big reddit user, but /r/Soylent has 19,278 subscribers and about 55 active users right now. I don’t know how useful it would be to compare those subscribers/visitors to other subs, but let’s do it anyway.

/r/Diablo has 143,547 subscribers with 306 active users right now. I can’t find exact figures, but let’s guess about 20 million copies sold across Diablo to Diablo 3.

/r/leagueoflegends has 836,454 subscribers and 17,022 active users right now. According to Wikipedia, “As of January 2014, over 67 million people played League of Legends per month, 27 million per day, and over 7.5 million concurrently during peak hours.” LoL is a free-to-play game, so it’s likely some people have two or more accounts.

/r/overwatch has 383,276 subscribers and 14,111 active users right now. Overwatch was released a couple weeks ago and has sold over 7 million copies in its first week (and almost 10 million played the open beta, if I recall correctly).

/r/cooking has 349,730 subscribers and 299 active users right now. Some people like to cook?

From this data, I can tell you that Soylent is less popular on reddit than both cooking and video games played by millions.

In the blog post about mold on October 2, 2015, they say they have shipped out “more than 400,000 bottles” of 2.0, which started shipping on about September 9 of that year. 400,000 bottles in 24 days is about 16667 bottles per day. At the full price of $34 per 12 bottles ($2.83 per bottle), that is $47,222 per day. At the old 15% sub discount ($2.41 per bottle), that is $40,139 per day. So a naïve calculation would be $14,650,694 to $17,236,111 in sales from 2.0 per year. I bet it’s much higher, if anything. I’m not aware of any sales figures for the powder, but I assume any growth would be modulated by people switching or partially switching to 2.0. I’m waiting for 1.6 to try the powder again.

After an initial joyful burst of activity after i discovered Soylent, I do not find there to be much that changes so I often go several days without checking these forums and even longer posting. I just check every so often in case there is info about v1.6 or solid forms, or etc.

It’s interesting to compare the percentage of active subscribers between /r/Soylent and /r/Cooking.

/r/Soylent would have 0.2% active while /r/Cooking had 0.08% of subscribers active.

Presumably /r/cooking has been around longer than /r/soylent and has accumulated more inactive subscriber, so it’s hard to really compare those numbers. However, it is clear that cooking takes more work and time than using Soylent. My hypothesis is that Reddit users who don’t subscribe to Soylent are too busy cooking to spend time browsing Reddit.

Okay let’s also keep in mind for comparison how many active users there are on other food product forums, you know, like the aforementioned Cheerios? What about Doritos, are their forums humming with activity? Oreo’s? Oh, none of them actually have forums? Then by definition, the Soylent forums are actually infinitely busier. It’s not a very good metric. Realistically all we can say is, can you still acquire Soylent? Then the business must still be working, be thankful.